A Czech journalist is depicted as a collage of modern technology. What would Umbo make of our 21st-century tech?
Umbo (Otto Umbehr), The Roving Reporter, photomontage (rephotographed), 1926
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:06] This is Steven Zucker.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:08] Beth Harris. Introducing…
Dr. Juliana Kreinik: [0:10] Julie Kreinik.
Dr. Harris: [0:11] Julie’s here for the first time joining us in Smarthistory, and we’re going to talk about this cool photograph that I really love. Can you tell us what it is?
Dr. Kreinik: [0:21] It’s actually a photomontage, and the title is “The Roving or Frantic Reporter.”
Dr. Harris: [0:27] This is a portrait of a specific person, right?
Dr. Kreinik: [0:30] It is a portrait of a Czech journalist. The portrait is from 1926, and is of a man named Egon Erwin Kisch.
Dr. Zucker: [0:40] He was an actual reporter.
Dr. Kreinik: [0:41] He was an actual reporter, an actual journalist who was roving around, mostly in Germany and in big cities like Berlin. The photomontage is by this amazing German artist Otto Umbehr, who went by the name Umbo.
Dr. Harris: [0:57] What’s amazing about Umbehr?
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] Look at this, it’s fantastic. [laughs]
Dr. Kreinik: [1:04] We’re going to call him Umbo because that’s the slang name that he chose for himself. He just went by Umbo. Umbo created this photomontage, and it relates both directly to the kind of journalist that Kisch was, and that he was roving around and he was frantically seeking new information.
[1:23] It also relates to this idea that we’re totally informed by the technologies of our own era. I think it’s fascinating to look at all these modern technologies that create this journalist, that make up him.
Dr. Zucker: [1:40] In a sense, make up the culture at this moment.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:42] Absolutely.
Dr. Harris: [1:43] Really dominated the way people were interacting with the world, just like we are so involved in the Internet, chatting, and IM, all of these technologies.
[1:54] [crosstalk]
Dr. Zucker: [1:54] The word you used a moment ago, dominating, is perfect because this is a giant who’s striding over the city.
Dr. Harris: [2:00] He is.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:01] He is. He’s dominating the landscape completely.
Dr. Harris: [2:04] And he sees everything, sort of like God.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:07] He does. He has all of these sort of enhanced appendages and sensory abilities so that you can see the camera lens makes up his right eye and he has these phonograph speakers as his ears. He hears better than anyone else.
Dr. Harris: [2:25] He is better.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:27] He sees better. He moves better.
Dr. Harris: [2:29] His leg is a car and a plane.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:31] He’s ready to move.
Dr. Zucker: [2:32] It’s so interesting, because in the ’20s is when popular comic figures were with expanded powers.
Dr. Harris: [2:41] Mm-hmm, superheroes.
Dr. Zucker: [2:42] Superheroes were really being developed…
Dr. Harris: [2:44] Is that true? Does that date from the ’20s?
Dr. Zucker: [2:46] Absolutely.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:46] It’s like a superhero journalist.
Dr. Harris: [2:49] It’s true. It reminds me of walking around texting now with your phone. He’s actually typing…
Dr. Kreinik: [2:58] He’s typing as he goes.
Dr. Harris: [3:00] …as he’s striding over the mountains and the crowd below.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:04] Of course, at the time, the typewriter is to them what the Blackberry is to us, or an iPhone. It’s that thing that speeds up communication.
Dr. Zucker: [3:14] That’s really interesting, because now, of course, in the popular press, there’s all these fears about people spending too much time on their Blackberries, too much time on their computers. I mean this is…
Dr. Harris: [3:26] Multitasking. He’s like the original multitasker.
[3:29] [crosstalk]
Dr. Zucker: [3:27] This is also, I think, an expression of those fears.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:30] It’s a monstrous figure with this technology. I think he’s also — while he’s heroic in that he’s huge and enormous, and he has all these enhanced sensory abilities like a superhero, has superpowers — he’s also maybe a little menacing.
Dr. Harris: [3:45] Yeah.
Dr. Zucker: [3:46] No question.
Dr. Harris: [3:47] He’s going to stomp on the crowd below and kill them.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:49] Yes, he’s going to crush them with all of his abilities there.
Dr. Harris: [3:51] This also really reminds me of images of people after World War I with prostheses.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:57] Yes.
Dr. Zucker: [3:57] Oh, so, the deformation of the body.
Dr. Harris: [4:00] Yeah, the veterans coming back and images by George Grosz.
Dr. Kreinik: [4:04] The wounded war veterans the Kriegskrüppel — the war cripple. That was just this huge symbolic and literal figure that came into the German, I mean many landscapes, but especially all across Germany, there were four million new wounded war veterans…
Dr. Harris: [4:23] That were all of a sudden…
[4:24] [crosstalk]
Dr. Kreinik: [4:25] Not all of them had prosthetic limbs, but a huge proportion of them did. The technologies of the war all of a sudden totally changed the way people relate to their own bodies and the way that they relate to other people’s bodies.
[4:40] This isn’t really a good association, because Germany lost the war. They’re not looked on as heroic figures, they’re the veterans who lost, and they lost their limbs.
Dr. Harris: [4:52] It’s a reminder to [German] humiliation.
Dr. Kreinik: [4:55] Yeah.
Dr. Zucker: [4:55] But that’s been reversed here, because even though there’s a menace and there’s a negative aspect to some extent, there’s also a real promise here and sense of power. The parts of his face that are not obscured are still really quite handsome. There’s a very positive aspect here as well.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:10] I think he’s dashing.
Dr. Harris: [5:11] He is dashing, with a cigarette, suave and kind of glamorous.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:16] He’s very glamorous.
Dr. Zucker: [5:17] It’s a kind of retrieval of the promise of technology then, in some way.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:20] Sort of trying to reclaim technology as something that offers promise, optimism, and hope and things that help.
Dr. Harris: [5:28] Progress.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:29] Progress, exactly, modern culture and progress.
Dr. Zucker: [5:32] This was a pretty desperate moment in German economic history.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:36] Well, it’s actually, interestingly, a few years after desperation. Things are better in Germany.
Dr. Harris: [5:43] Slightly better.
Dr. Kreinik: [5:43] They’re slightly better in 1926, a lot better than they were in 1920. Through the early ’20s, things were still in recovery, but by the mid ’20s things are getting better, I think in large part due to things like industrial growth.
Dr. Harris: [5:57] I’m wondering if people looking at this and seeing the camera by his eye would’ve thought of those images of gas masks during the war.
Dr. Zucker: [6:06] Yeah. It’s a pretty dense layer of associations here. It’s pretty extraordinary. How was this kind of imagery received in the ’20s?
Dr. Kreinik: [6:15] I think it had different audiences. I think artists that looked at it that were interested in new kinds of image making, new vision photography, received it really well. This was also on the cover of a book that was a collection of Kisch’s journalistic pieces.
[6:29] It was reproduced many, many times. That’s also relating to the idea of modern technology and reproduction. The image is reproduced, it’s rephotographed.
Dr. Harris: [6:38] Made from photographs.
Dr. Kreinik: [6:40] It’s made from photographs, pieced together, there are a variety of echoes. For me, one of the really interesting things is the idea of the speed and technology. Everything coming together. The journalist is exploring things and looking all around him.
[6:55] It’s almost like he can see everything at once, and technology is what’s enabling him to do that. I think that idea, that technology enables us to do more and better and faster.
Dr. Harris: [7:04] Which we still have.
Dr. Kreinik: [7:05] Exactly. I think it was exciting then, and I think it was exciting…
Dr. Harris: [7:09] Technology can solve our problems.
Dr. Zucker: [7:10] I think also the reassertion of the power of the journalist is probably a really important issue at this moment, especially if we get the sense that the journalist has some integrity, is not a part of a larger machine of propaganda and has some objectivity.
Dr. Harris: [7:25] Right, which is also, of course, going to disappear in Nazi Germany.
Dr. Zucker: [7:30] Very quickly.
Dr. Kreinik: [7:30] By the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, things are looking vastly different. But ’26 is a good year, I think. The economy is looking up, things aren’t quite looking bad yet. There’s this moment of progress, and technology is just integral to that like it’s integral to his body.
Dr. Zucker: [7:51] It’s fascinating. Terrific. Thanks.
[7:53] [music]
